“Hail Mary, full of grace”: millions of Catholics say these words every day, often without lingering on the last one. Yet grace is one of the most beautiful words in the Christian vocabulary, and one of the hardest to draw. There is no grace emoji, so we fall back on ✨, which also does duty for glitter, flash sales and engagement announcements.
The same Latin root, gratia, lies behind both “grace” and “gratis”, and that is no accident. Grace is a gift from God that you do not earn, do not deserve and cannot pay back. Saint Paul tells the Ephesians that it is by grace they have been saved, and not by their own doing. A slightly baffling idea in the age of loyalty points. English keeps a lovely trace of it at the table: before a meal, many families still “say grace”, even if the youngest is mainly checking that nobody starts eating first.
How do you picture something invisible and unearned? Maybe open hands 🤲 receiving a ray of light, a soft rain falling on dry ground, a wrapped present with no price tag. The idea is yours, and fittingly, sending it costs nothing: the form is right below.
There’s no proposal yet!
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